Bobby And Emma's Excellent Adventure
by Mr Sinister
Summary: Bobby Drake & Emma Frost were hoping for a great night out... but you can always count on dimensional anomalies to mess up those kinds of plans, can't you? Chapter Six Now Up!
1. Reeking Of Awesomeness

**_Bobby & Emma's Excellent Adventure_**

**_Chapter One: Reeking Of Awesomeness_**

Manhattan is nice this time of the evening – there's less going on than there usually is, because everybody's gone from work, and just getting back to their apartments so that they can change and come back out again for the evening. That's why Emma and I chose this time to come out for a little while – well, I say "chose", but what _really_ happened was that Emma ordered me to take her out so we could do something fun. So I pulled on some smart clothes, waited for Emma to get dressed up and put her make-up on, and then sat in the back of her limousine making out with her until we got into the city. So here we are, walking through the bright lights of the big city and trying to find something to do. I'm picking through a carton of cheap Chinese food with a pair of plastic chopsticks, and Emma is busily trying to ignore my noisy eating.

"I still can't believe you can eat that, Bobby," she says, glancing at the lumps of sweet and sour pork nestling in oily egg-fried rice. "It's not exactly… healthy, is it?"

"Nope," I say, picking up a piece of pork and popping it into my mouth before the chopsticks let it plop back into the carton. "That's why it's so great, though, don't you think?"

Emma rolls her eyes. "No, I don't. I always preferred French food over this kind of thing; it always seemed a whole lot more edible – and a lot less fattening."

That makes me laugh. "Hey, I'm an X-Man, baby – I don't need no stinkin' diets! Fighting guys like Apocalypse and Sinister is the best exercise regime anybody could think up."

"Yes, well, I'll take Jane Fonda any day," Emma shoots back. "She's a whole lot less lethal than En Sabah Nur, after all."

"You obviously haven't seen her when she's angry," I reply, swallowing a clump of spicy noodles. "You really wouldn't like her when she's angry."

Emma raises an eyebrow. "Oh, shut up, Drake." Then she spots something up ahead and grabs my arm, almost spilling the rest of my Chinese out onto the sidewalk. "Come on – I've just spotted where we can spend the evening." She points in the direction she wants us to go, and I can see a packed bar with glowing X-shaped neon signs bolted to the outer walls, and with two huge men in black suits, sunglasses and overcoats stood outside the doors, their arms folded over their massive muscular chests. Truth be told, it seems like a pretty regular bar from the outside, but as I get closer I can see that it's nothing of the kind – the patrons are all fairly obvious mutants, with scales, fur and talons all featuring quite regularly in their appearances. Even the doormen are mutants, their foreheads decorated with looping horns like those on a ram, and their legs showing reverse-jointed knees under the pin-sharp creases on their pants. They seem to be identical twins, since they both have the same basic appearance, but they both have unique, individual aspects to their clothes and faces (for instance, one has a curling tribal tattoo around his left eye), so it's easy to tell them apart. As Emma gets closer, they both bend at the waist and push aside the line of people waiting to get in.

"Evening, Miss Frost," the tattooed one says in a deep, surprisingly relaxed tone, before he nods in my direction. "Is he with you?"

"Yes, Charles, he's with me." _I used to come here a lot when I was younger,_ she explains to me as she speaks. _They all know me here, so it's a lot easier to keep a low profile if I want to – if I don't want to be found or disturbed, they'll arrange it for me. _"His name is Bobby Drake – if he comes back here in the future, I don't want him being given any trouble, is that clear?"

"Yes, Miss Frost," Charles replies, nodding, before he holds the door open and lets us both walk in. I can sense we're being given a lot of dirty looks from the people who are waiting in line, but Emma doesn't seem to be giving them a second thought. I guess she must be used to that by now, though, so it shouldn't really be too surprising.

_Just ignore them,_ Emma sends to me. _Don't let them get to you._

_I'm not,_ I think back to her. _Can we start talking again, now?_

Emma chuckles lightly. "If that's what you want." Then she prowls closer to the bar, shifting people out of the way just by nodding at them (which makes them wander off looking like they've just dropped a ton of acid, before they come to a few feet away, wondering what the hell just happened to them. She pulls out a stool at the bar and hops elegantly up onto its padded top, clicking her fingers for service. When the bald, scale-faced girl behind the bar comes over to her, she orders a glass of white wine for herself and a tall, cold beer for me, and then leads me over to a table in the corner, where she sits on the closest seat and sips her drink as if she doesn't have a care in the world (and to be honest, I don't think she does, really). "So, Robert, what do you think?"

"I think it's a nice place," I say, honestly. "Is it just for mutants? I haven't seen one really ordinary human in here since we arrived."

"I hate to tell you this, Bobby, but you look like an ordinary human," Emma reminds me, "and I hope I do as well." She pauses. "Although if I ever hear you calling me 'ordinary', I'll scratch your eyes out."

"Thanks for that, Em," I tell her, thanking my lucky stars that she probably wouldn't follow through on that threat. Probably. "So _is_ this a mutants-only club?"

"Not exactly," Emma replies, swallowing a small mouthful of white wine, "but mutants are pretty much the only people that come here. Normal humans don't like mixing with us freaks, it seems."

I shrug. "Their loss – hey, hot chick, twelve o'clock."

Emma turns slightly, without being too obvious about it, so she can glance at the person I'm talking about – a black-haired girl with rainbow-coloured skin and two thin, shiny butterfly wings growing from each of her shoulders, who is drinking her Shirley Temple through what looks like a long hollow tongue. Her pretty face glitters with multicoloured stripes as light reflects off it at different angles, and with every movement she makes she sends puffs of fragile scales into the air, which shine just as brightly as the rest of her. Her almond-shaped eyes are divided into dozens of tiny segments that are partially obscured by long fluttering lashes, and two thin, delicate antennae hang down over her eyebrows. Emma purrs with interest, and says "I always knew I liked your taste in women, Bobby. Do you think we should invite her over for a drink?"

"You're the boss, honey," I tell her, getting up off my chair. "I'll make the introductions, shall I?" I'm just about to turn away when Emma reaches forward and grabs my right arm just above the elbow.

"I don't think so," she says, chuckling. "You'd better just leave this to me. I know how to sweet-talk women… unlike you."

"Ouch. You really know how to compliment a guy, you know that?" Emma laughs, and then sashays over to where the girl is standing, swinging her slender hips and oozing sex all over everything she touches. I watch her introduce herself, see her shake hands with the girl, and then see her lean closer to the other woman in order to (I guess) whisper something in her ear. Of course, knowing Emma, she just as easily might be sucking on the lady's earlobe, but we'll see what happens from here on in, I suppose.

It doesn't take long after that – whatever Emma was doing – for her to come back to the table with the butterfly-girl in tow. "Bobby," she says when she arrives back at her seat, "this is Lisa Burrows. Lisa, this is my… friend… Bobby Drake."

"Hi there," the butterfly girl says to me, in a voice that sounds almost musical, in a way. "Nice to meet you, Bobby."

"The pleasure's all mine," I say, taking the hand she's holding out and bringing it to my lips momentarily (hey, who says Gambit has to be the only charming rogue in the X-Men?), before I pull out the empty stool across from me so that Lisa can sit and put her Shirley Temple down on our table. She takes another look at the two of us together, and raises a dark eyebrow, her rainbow-coloured skin rippling with colour as she does so, before she points at us with one slender finger.

"If you don't mind me saying so, you two don't… um… don't look very much like mutants to me," she says, curiously. "I didn't know humans came here."

"They don't," Emma says, in a matter-of-fact kind of way. "I'm a telepath."

"And I'm Mr Frosty's big brother," I chime in, icing up both my hands and dropping a couple of ice cubes into my glass. "We're mutants, all right."

Lisa nods thoughtfully, sucking a small mouthful of her drink through her long flexible tongue and shrugging. "It must be nice to be able to blend in," she says, dropping her gaze a little.

Time for some patented Drake magic, I think. "Trust me, kid," I begin, trying to sound as encouraging as I can, "blending in is over-rated. And besides, if I were as beautiful as you, I'd be proud to show off who I was."

Lisa's rainbow-coloured features shift their colour so that they glow a little more brightly, and she bites her lip bashfully. "Thank… thank you," she says, sounding a little taken aback.

_Settle down, Bobby, you've embarrassed her now,_ Emma sends to me while giving me a sharp glare. "You'll have to excuse Bobby," she says aloud. "He gets a bit… overenthusiastic… around pretty girls."

"No, no, I liked it," Lisa says, before she smiles at me in a shy sort of way. "It was nice of you to say that – thank you."

_Take that, Emma,_ I think triumphantly. _I rule and you drool! _Emma gives me a glare that could almost boil meat off a bone, which means it's time for me to shut up.

"So, Lisa," Emma says without missing a beat, confident that she's made her point, "where do you live?"

"Mutant Town," Lisa says, shrugging. "It's cheap enough there that I can afford my own place, and besides, I don't get things thrown at me all day long."

"Yeah, I can see why that would be a bonus," I agree, feeling slightly guilty about my exclusive housing arrangements. "Emma and I live in Westchester." I can sense an angry retort about to come from Emma, so I add "Well, Emma lives in Boston, but she visits me a lot."

"Westchester, huh?" Lisa replies, looking thoughtful. "I hear it's nice out there – not many cars. Must be nice not to have to breathe smog all day long."

"Oh, it gets pretty rough out there sometimes," I say. I figure that's ambiguous enough not to give away what really goes on at the school. "I mean, I hear the phrase 'I'm gonna bust a cap in your ass, bitch!' at least ten times a day. It's a rough neighbourhood – kinda like Harlem, but with more trees."

Lisa laughs, a delicate, trilling sound that sounds like a cricket's song. "I didn't know it was that bad. You must have quite a few stories to tell."

"You bet I do," I reply, getting into the spirit of things perhaps a bit _too _much. "You can join up my bullet wound scars and make a picture of a puppy dog. I call him Scooby-Doo."

"Wasn't Scrappy the puppy?" Lisa asks. I put a finger to my lips quickly, as if she's just said something really dangerous.

"Don't say that name!" I whisper. "Don't ever mention Scrappy-Doo, or he'll come and eat your pets in the night! Seriously, that thing was evil incarnate. He ruined the cartoons and even that piece of crap movie made fun of him."

"I'll take your word for it," Lisa chuckles, drinking some more of her Shirley Temple.

Emma gets up from her seat. "Excuse me," she says. "I have to go to the bathroom." _I'll be back when you stop making an idiot of yourself, Drake._ With that, she prowls off towards the ladies' room, leaving me alone with Lisa, who points a concerned thumb in her direction.

"Don't you want to go after her?" she asks. "She seemed pretty pissed-off."

"Ah, she's just annoyed because I made you laugh," I say, waving a hand nonchalantly. "Emma's like that – she has to do everything first. She'll be okay."

"You're sure about that?" Lisa seems unconvinced. "I don't want to cause an argument between you two –"

I touch her gently on the shoulder and look her directly in her segmented eyes, trying to seem as reassuring as I can. "It's okay, kid, really. Emma'll be back when she's cooled off, I guarantee it."

"Sooner than that, I think," Lisa says, gesturing with one multi-jointed finger towards where the door to the ladies' room is. "I think she's found herself another new friend." I turn to see what she's pointing at, expecting to see Emma hanging off the arm of another man – but when I see who she's really with, the hairs on the back of my neck spring upright faster than Hank on Christmas morning.

The air shimmers around her, as if she's got studio lights focused on her from every direction at once. Her six arms are arranged like the petals of a flower, each one of them holding a glass of what looks like vodka, and her armoured body slides through the crowd as if they aren't there.

"Hello, screwloose," she says as she reaches our table, an almost impossibly-wide grin creasing her features. "Been a long time, hasn't it?"

"Spiral," I reply as politely as I can, even though every part of me is begging me to grab Emma's hand and run out of the bar as quickly as possible. "What can we do for you?"

"Lord Mojo wants you to help him out. The other Spineless Ones are getting restless watching reruns of the X-Men, and he needs some new primetime shows to keep their attention."

I frown. "Couldn't he just… I dunno… make some new shows that _don't_ have the X-Men in them?" It's a stupid question, I know, but it had to be asked. "Maybe the Spineless Ones would like that better?"

Spiral snorts, as if I've just said the dumbest thing in the universe. "You don't understand, screwloose. Lord Mojo has to give the public what they want, and what they want is more X-Men."

Lisa's shimmering face crumples into a confused frown, and she looks at me, puzzled. "Wait... you're an X-Man?"

"Yeah," I say, reaching into a pocket so that I can draw out my comm. badge and show it to her. Given that we've just had our cover blown by a dimension-hopping TV addict with shiny eyes and several metal limbs (and given that I talked to the addict using her name instead of saying "Who the hell are you?"), I figure it's pointless to try to pretend we've been victims of mistaken identity. Besides, if Emma's at all worried, she'll most likely do some memory surgery later on… "Better leave now, kid, or you'll just get sucked into this whole stupid situation. And believe me, if that happens, you'll never live it down…"

Lisa gets off her stool and begins to back slowly away, when one of Spiral's six arms suddenly snakes out and grabs her tightly by the wrist. "Oh, you're not going anywhere, little butterfly," Spiral cackles, a crazy light shining in her ice-blue eyes. Lisa struggles against Spiral's grip, but the other woman is stronger by far, and has five other hands to use, so it's a pretty one-sided contest in the end. "Like a moth to a flame," Spiral snickers, giggling like she's just taken in a lungful of laughing gas. "Let's just hope your wings don't catch fire, shall we?"

With that, she snaps the fingers on all of her other hands, and the bar melts away around us, replaced by blotchy lumps of light and colour, and some weird noises that I can't quite identify. That only lasts a few seconds before reality fades back in, and I can see something other than a bad special effect. The four of us seem to be in the Savage Land, with dinosaurs stomping through the undergrowth all around us and huge flying reptiles gliding through the air over our heads. "You brought us to the Savage Land?" I ask, trying my hardest to sound unimpressed. "What a waste of time – I've beaten everything this place has to offer with one hand iced up behind my back."

Spiral grins nastily. "Whoever said this was the Savage Land, screwloose? This is the Cretaceous period, 65 million years before you took your first turn on centre stage." She wags a forefinger at me, as if I'm a child who's been caught stealing cookies. "You should know there's always a plot twist before you get to the happy ending." Then she spreads her hands and gestures around her, like a director moving her actors. "If you can survive for long enough, I'll take you somewhere else."

"How about you take us home _right now_?" I say, taking a step towards Spiral and icing up both of my fists, making sure that she gets my meaning. She blinks once, and then bursts out laughing again.

"And miss the chance to give Lord Mojo a smash-hit for the new fall season? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard, even from you." She snaps her fingers and a small, buzzing camera pops into existence over her left shoulder, and then hovers quickly over to where Emma, Lisa and I are standing so that it can take in my anger, Emma's fury and Lisa's fear all in one sweeping movement of its lens. "This camera will be your window to your home," Spiral explains. "Please Lord Mojo, and he'll bring you home faster. Fail to please him, and you'll be dinosaur food sooner rather than later – that I can guarantee." She cackles loudly, snaps her fingers, and then steps into the portal that has opened behind her. Before it closes, though, she turns and says two words: "It's showtime."


	2. Another Fine Mess

**_Bobby & Emma's Excellent Adventure:_**

**_Chapter Two: Another Fine Mess_**

"I hate you, Robert Drake."

I roll my eyes. "I think I got that the first twenty times you said that, Emma." Swatting aside the camera that Spiral left to watch us as it buzzes noisily around my head, I glance ahead of me and try to make out something from the endless green in front of me. Coming to a stop, I point up the trail ahead of us. "Okay," I begin, looking at both Emma and at Lisa, the civilian girl who got pulled back in time with us, "there's a waterhole in front of us. Emma, I need you to do a scan for me, just to give us a clue of what's out there."

Emma raises an eyebrow. "What do you expect me to say, Bobby? 'Oh yes, I clearly recognise those thoughts as a Tyrannosaurus Rex'?" She sighs, and rubs at her sweat-streaked forehead with one hand. "I can sense a few minds, but they're too vague for me to get any kind of fix on them."

"I could fly ahead," Lisa pipes up suddenly, causing both Emma and me to look at her in surprise. She raises her eyebrows briefly, and then shrugs herself out of her jacket, tying its sleeves around her waist. When she's done that, I can see a couple of folded, shimmering wings hanging from Lisa's shoulders, which are bunched up beneath a couple of hardened covers. As they extend to their full length, she continues "I usually keep these hidden, but I figure we could use them right now, don't you?"

"Good idea," I agree, suddenly feeling pretty impressed with how Lisa's decided to handle this situation. She could have told us both to go to hell, but she's actually trying to help us all out – which is a better reaction than I could have expected from a lot of people I know. "Be careful though, okay?"

"Careful's my middle name," Lisa grins, before she spreads her wings and lifts herself off the ground and into the insect-thick air. "See you soon, handsome." She rises above the jungle canopy and flies ahead of us, moving so quickly that it's only a few moments before we've lost sight of her. When she's gone, I turn to Emma and see her standing with her hands on her hips.

"Don't say a word, Bobby," she says. "I can't stand you when you're full of yourself."

"Hey, she likes what she sees. I can't help it if I'm irresistible, can I?"

"You're not as irresistible as you like to think, Bobby," Emma retorts. Then she turns to the camera that's floating by her impossibly-tidy hair and says "Bobby here wants me to get a tattoo that says 'Bobby Drake is my best lover ever' on one of my buttocks. And then he wants me to do it with another girl just so he can watch. Isn't that right, Bobby?"

Suddenly I feel like I want to scrape myself a big, deep hole and crawl into it to escape. I can feel my cheeks burning with horribly intense embarrassment (although I don't know why. The Spineless Ones on the other end of the camera won't care one way or the other if what Emma's just said is true or not – they're just after good TV), and I find myself looking at the camera with a wounded look on my face, saying "That's not true! She made it all up!"

Emma simply looks at her nails and laughs. "Oh, I bet you wish it was all untrue, don't you… Tarzan." She winks at the camera before blowing me a kiss. "That's the name he likes me to call him when we're… you know." _Don't worry, Bobby, I'll take it all back before we go home._ She wrinkles her nose at me, marking an X across her chest. _Cross my heart._

I scowl. "Somehow that doesn't fill me with confidence."

Before Emma can reply and rob me of any more of my dignity, Lisa lands beside us, her feet touching the leafy forest floor without making a sound. She folds her wings up inside their cases and jerks a thumb towards the waterhole in front of us. "Well, there's good news, and there's bad news. The good news is that we've got a wide open space ahead of us, with plenty of plant-eaters around."

"What's the bad news?" I ask, knowing right away that I'm going to regret asking.

Lisa raises her eyebrows, and rubs at the corner of her segmented eyes with her multi-jointed fingers. "The bad news… the bad news is that there's five big-ass tyrannosaurus rex drinking from that pond out there, and they don't look like they're just there for milk and cookies."

"Five?" Emma says, looking surprised for the first time in I don't know how long. "I thought these things were solitary?"

"That's what Hollywood likes to portray them as, yeah," Lisa replies. "Doesn't tie up with the fossil record, though – quite a few finds have three or four skeletons in them. Apparently T-Rex liked to gather together, at least some of the time. Like now, for instance." She absorbs the stunned looks that Emma and I are quite obviously giving her, and grins. "What can I say? I watch the Discovery Channel a lot."

"Guess I should quit watching VH-1," I mutter, pushing forwards through the undergrowth to take a look at what we're up against. The sight steals my breath from my throat, even though I've spent more than a little while in the Savage Land, and seeing living dinosaurs isn't exactly news to me. This is the real deal, not a preserved rerun, and the stars are getting very restless. They're bigger than I expected, too, which doesn't help – there are five of them, as Lisa said, and they all average about fourteen metres long from the tips of their tails to the lethal mouthfuls of teeth they're carrying in their huge, heavy skulls. Their hides are decorated with unique patterns of stripes, spots and blotches of colour, and they're all busy chewing the bones of a dead three-horned dinosaur – I can't tell what kind, though, because there isn't much left of it. Blood streaks their skin and they're all totally focused on eating, pulling huge chunks of skin and muscle clear of the carcass, and swallowing them whole. "Okay," I whisper, trying hard not to pee my pants, "here's what we're going to do –"

"Run like hell, and hope they don't notice us?" Emma says sourly. "Good God, Drake, those things could outrun us without even breathing hard."

I nod. "I know – and that's why we're not going to try to outrun them." Pointing to the tree line on the other side of the clearing, I say "That's where we need to be, right? So we're going to get there by keeping in cover, and hoping those guys don't spot us." Taking a deep breath, I start creeping around the edge of the clearing, taking small, careful footsteps so as not to snap any twigs, with Emma and Lisa following me doing the same thing. As we move, we can see two of the T-Rex start snapping angrily at each other, their massive teeth shearing into each other's flanks and spraying bright blood everywhere.

"Guess someone forgot their table manners," Lisa mutters as she pushes aside a large flat leaf. "Remind me not to piss those guys off."

"I second that," I say, watching the two animals glaring at each other with their beady eyes. "Come on; we're almost in the clear –"

Just then, the camera that's been following us turns back towards the feeding dinosaurs and screeches loudly, making every single one of the massive monsters turn their huge skulls in our direction. Emma gulps, and for the first time in a long time, I can feel that she's afraid – terrified, even – and that feeling only gets worse when the largest of the dinosaurs roars, so loudly that it almost cuts a slice out of the air, and begins to move towards us. The movement is slow at first, but it rapidly begins to pick up, and before long the monster is charging towards us at full speed. "Move!" I yell. "If we get into cover it won't be able to follow us!" Stumbling into the shadow of a massive redwood tree, I drag Emma and Lisa with me, putting the bulk of a shattered, horizontal tree-trunk between us and the bull as it runs towards us. As we keep running, I look behind us to see the bull smashing the fallen tree with one massive foot, not even breaking stride to look at its handiwork. _Oh well,_ I find myself thinking absently._ There goes that idea…_

Beside me I can hear a wheezy prayer. Lisa is reciting a Hail Mary as she runs, every word scraping out of her throat as if it is two sizes too big. Emma, on the other hand, has stopped running and is standing facing the T-Rex as it approaches us. "Emma!" I shout. "Come on!" Predictably, she ignores me, and stays where she is.

As the bull is almost about to crush her with its jaws, she clenches both fists and braces her feet on the ground as if she's about to get hit in the stomach. The bull is suddenly frozen in place, its butcher-knife teeth stuck a few feet away from Emma's body, drool dripping off them in gooey, blood-streaked ropes. "Bad dog," Emma purrs, patting it on the nose with one hand. "Go play with your friends." Abruptly, the dinosaur turns and stalks stiffly back to the clearing, as nails-on-a-chalkboard calls echo in the air above us.

When Lisa and I walk back to where Emma is standing, we find her standing with her arms folded and with a smug (but also pretty obviously relieved) grin on her face. "It's all right," she says. "You can thank me now, or you can thank me later. It's entirely up to you."

"Are you crazy?" I yell, suddenly furious that Emma would put herself at risk like that. "You could have been killed!"

"Could have, yes. But I wasn't, was I, Robert?" Emma chuckles. "Do you really think that a human brain couldn't affect a dinosaur brain? That T-Rex was putty in my hands."

"Okay," I say, trying desperately to keep at least a little bit of my composure. "So why didn't you pull that trick _before_ you almost got your head chewed off like a cheap Pez dispenser? Why couldn't you have just let us get past those guys without any trouble?"

"It wasn't fun," Emma replies, shrugging. "Don't tell me your heart wasn't _racing_ then."

"Guys," Lisa interrupts, looking like she's just about ready to pop Emma's skull open and scoop out her brains herself, "I think we have bigger problems." She jerks a long, chitin-tipped thumb at the hovering camera, which zips away to a safer distance as she glares at it. "That thing made sure we got spotted by those dinosaurs in the first place. How many more times is it going to do that before one of us gets killed?"

"Let's not think about that right now, huh?" I say, wiping some dirty sweat out of my face. "How about we try moving away from the rest of those guys and finding somewhere that we can chill out for a while?"

"Good idea," Lisa agrees. "Lead the way."

About half an hour later, we come across a cave that leads down underneath the ground. It's damp, it's cold and there's water dripping down the walls, but it's better than staying out in the open, so we all hurry inside and try not to make that much noise – with the echo inside the cave, it'd be like holding up a big neon sign saying "Chow time".

Emma stretches as she sits on a large rock, her hands clenching into fists as she does so, and then she says "So what's our next move?"

"Well, we can't stay here forever," Lisa replies, before gesturing to the path we cleared for ourselves on the way to our current location. "Sooner or later something's going to catch our scent, and then we'll be sunk."

"Good point," I say, looking out of the cave's entrance to see what's around. Luckily for us, there's nothing really big waiting to use us as a running buffet – but there are a couple of huge armoured monsters with massive clubs on the ends of their tails wandering past. They're not walking together, but just going in the same direction – they seem to be keeping their distance from each other. "Wait a second," I whisper, pointing at them with an outstretched finger. "What are they?"

"Ankylosaurs," Lisa replies. "Plant eaters. We should be fine as long as we don't get in their way."

_Well, that's a comfort,_ I think sourly. "Come on, guys. Let's get moving – don't want to be stuck in a _Godzilla_ movie for any longer than we have to be, right?"

Creeping past the two dinosaurs as quietly as we can, we manage to get away without making either of them mad, which I count as a very good thing. Both of them look like they could squash the three of us into greasy red smears without breaking a sweat… if dinosaurs could actually sweat, that is. _Stupid biology._

Beside me, Emma is muttering rude words to herself as she gets her sleeve caught on a tangled bunch of thorns, and the fabric tears with an angry ripping sound. "This is all your fault, Drake," she snarls, stabbing her finger at me like a knife. "If I hadn't been sitting around with you, I'd never have been dragged here."

"That's true," I say patiently, trying to see if I can find a path through the dense thicket of ferns in front of me, "but you've been in worse situations before. Try dealing with it, and see what happens."

Emma scowls. "I hate you."

Coughing slightly, Lisa points to the sky, and says pointedly "You guys want me to fly around for a bit so you can finish this up in private? I can, you know. Just say the word."

Emma visibly straightens, pulling down the frayed edges of her jacket and tucking her hair behind her ears. "No," she replies. "No, don't do that. I'm sure Drake and I can get on long enough for you to stay here. Isn't that right, Bobby?"

"Sure," I say, shrugging casually. "No problems here."

Lisa raises her eyebrows and then nods towards the horizon, before she flexes her wings and stretches, her wing cases skittering against her lower back. "Okay, then – glad that's settled."

Just then, though, a whirling pool of light appears at the back of the cave, and out of it steps Spiral, clapping with two of her hands and laughing crazily. "Bravo, darlings, bravo," she says in a delighted tone. "Lord Mojo is very pleased with your performances so far. He was especially fond of your telepathic trick with the tyrannosaurus, Emma." Spiral pauses long enough for Emma to fold her arms and look smug for a second or two, and then continues "But you're not done yet, I'm afraid." She clicks her fingers and the cave melts away, everything around us melting into a fuzzy white and black mess, like a TV that's been tuned wrongly, and I can feel my stomach doing a couple of backflips as I realise that I have absolutely no idea of what's going to happen next. That's not the greatest feeling in the world, I have to admit, and I really don't relish it. Spiral clicks her fingers again then, and I can feel something happening around us. I'm not sure what it is, but it feels like we're being thrown forwards like a rock from a catapult. And just before I feel like I'm going to puke, we come to a sudden halt and everything fades back into reality – or as close to reality as we're going to get while Mojo is having his fun with us, anyway.

The first thing I notice is the stink of horse crap. It's so strong that I almost can't focus on anything else – until I notice what I'm wearing. The clothes I'd been wearing before this all started have vanished, and I'm wearing a rough, ragged brown poncho over a dark shirt and dusty black pants. On top of my head is a battered Stetson, and I can feel the weight of two pistols at my hips.

_What the hell is going on here?_

It's then that I notice what Emma is wearing. She's dressed in a long, hooped white dress with a neckline that reaches almost up to her jaw, and has the strings of a dark blue bonnet tied under her chin. While she's looking at what I've been shoved into, Emma sees me gaping at her, and then takes a look down at herself curiously – and screams like she's just had her hand caught in a bear trap, her eyes going as wide as dinner plates.

"What is this?" she shrieks, grabbing handfuls of her skirt and shaking them at Spiral. "What have you done to me?"

"I've done nothing except prepare you all for your next little… trip, screwloose," Spiral chuckles. "Better saddle up, cowpokes." Then, she snaps her fingers and disappears into the same kind of whirling light that brought us all here, leaving the three of us all looking around in complete confusion. When she's got her bearings, though, Lisa (who's dressed in pretty much the same way as Emma, her wings and antennae all hidden by the masses of purple fabric that have wrapped themselves around her) points to her right, her long finger hidden inside a velvet glove.

"I think I see a saloon," she says. "You guys want to go check it out?"

"This is no time to think about getting drunk," Emma snaps, batting away the hovering camera with one irritated hand. Lisa shrugs, the lashes around her segmented eyes fluttering as she blinks slowly.

"Hey, who says we have to drink anything? We might at least find out where we are that way."

I nod. "Good idea. Come on, Emma – we might learn how to rope a steer while we're at it."

"You're getting funnier every day, Bobby," Emma snarls, before she picks up her skirts and flounces off towards the swinging doors of the saloon. "Don't fall behind."

When the three of us enter the saloon, there is a moment of unease as everybody else falls silent. I can feel dozens of eyes watching me as I walk up to the bar. "Three shots of gulping whiskey, please," I ask the woman serving the rest of the tanned, gun-toting lowlifes around us.

"Don't like strangers in these parts much," she says, making me feel like I've stepped into a bad Clint Eastwood movie. "You better be just passing through, boy."

"Oh, I hope so," I say, handing over the coins that I find have magically appeared in my pockets. "Wouldn't want to disturb you fine folks any more than we already have."

"Is that right?" says a rough, cigar-stained voice from behind me – and the quiet bar gets even quieter, if that's possible. I turn around and see a muscular man toting a pistol and a bad case of five o'clock shadow, along with a couple of gaps in his crooked smile where teeth have been knocked out. A wet lump of chewing tobacco is shoved into the side of his jaw, and he spits a long stream of brown drool into the bucket close to my feet. Some of it hits my pants, and I begin to guess that he's just looking for a fight.

_Well, if it's a fight he wants…_

Pushing up the rim of my hat, I look him right in the eye, step up to him so that we're nose-to-nose, and say in a confident voice (or as confident a voice as I can manage) "Your shoelace is untied."


	3. A Rootin' Tootin' Good Time

**_Bobby Emma's Excellent Adventure_**

**_Chapter Three: A Rootin' Tootin' Good Time_**

The big cowboy looks at me as if I've just crawled out from under a rock, and another dirty smirk spreads across his face. "Think I'm stupid, do you, boy?" he sneers, before he closes his fists and draws back to hit me. In the instant before he does, I duck inside his guard and hammer my right fist into his gut with all the force I can manage, enclosing my hand in a thick layer of tough ice just so I can be sure of making an impact, and then dissolving it before anybody gets a chance to see it clearly. The cowboy staggers back, stunned and wheezing, and I can hear the rest of the saloon drawing in a collective gasp. Whether that's because they're stunned I managed to get this guy to take a step backwards, or because they think I'm about to get my head blown off, I can't tell just yet. Out of the corner of my eye I can see Emma standing with her arms folded and an interested look on her face, almost as if she's curious as to how I'm going to handle myself. Lisa looks pretty damn frightened, though – and given that she's the least human-looking of all three of us, that doesn't surprise me. Hiding in the distracted crowd ought to buy her a little time, though, especially in that bonnet and dress of hers.

Right now, though, I've got bigger problems. The big cowboy manages to get his breath back and wipes a trickle of spittle off his chin before he steps right back up to me, his eyes blazing in anger. "You really _do_ think I'm stupid, don't you?" he hisses.

I smirk (probably not the wisest idea, but I can't help it sometimes), and pick up my shot glass, draining it in one go. The fire of the whiskey gives me a bit more bravery than usual, so I don't have any regrets about following up my contempt with a quick laugh. "Man, I don't think you're stupid – I _know_ it." That gets his attention, and he lunges at me again, still without going for his gun. Maybe he's so angry that he's forgotten it's there, I don't know. Maybe he's just too dumb to remember it. It doesn't matter much anyway – again I duck inside his defence and aim an elbow right at his temple, cracking bone on bone and sending jarring shockwaves into my hand. It does worse for the other guy, though, and he staggers backwards far enough for me to easily grab his wrist and twist it up behind his back. In this position it doesn't matter whether he's bigger or stronger than me; I've got all the leverage I need. Knocking one knee out from under him, I push him down to the ground and keep his head firmly in a stinking puddle of beer while he screams and swears at me with a face gone beet-red with fury. "See what I mean, monkey boy?" I say, feeling adrenaline burning into my system like liquid nitrogen. "You're all talk and no balls. Now get the hell out of this bar before I nail your ass to the wall." Pulling him up to his feet, I march him over to the doors of the saloon and shove him out with all the force I can muster – and then watch him stumble away to where his horse is tied up, all the while swearing revenge on me. I walk back to where Emma and Lisa are standing, soaking up the silence of the other patrons, and then nod to the lady behind the bar. "Don't think he'll be bothering you again, ma'am," I say, trying to sound as casual as possible.

"Maybe not, stranger, but he'll be coming after you," the lady says, looking astonished at how casual I sound. "That there was Jesse James you just beat the crap out of."

"You're kidding me," I gulp, suddenly feeling as astonished as the woman looks. "That punk was Jesse James?" The woman nods, her expression turning serious.

"Right," she replies. "And he'll be coming back to find you and your womenfolk before the day's out."

"That's all right," Emma purrs, and I'm suddenly sure I'm about to regret the rest of what she's going to say. "I'm sure Jesse James is no match for Rattlesnake Bob." _What can I say, Bobby?_ she chuckles._ All those viewings of **Young Guns** you forced on me must be paying off…_

"I'm sure," I mutter in a low voice. "I never had a problem working with Two-Gun Em, after all."

Behind me I can hear Lisa sighing quietly, so I give up on trying to score another (pretty glancing) hit on Emma's radar and turn towards her, grabbing the shot glass I'd intended to give her before being challenged by the cowboy and passing it to her. Then, I lead her and Emma over to a table in the corner of the room. As we get closer to it, the people sitting there stand up respectfully and move away, which is what I'd been counting on; apparently beating the crap out of someone in public gets you more than just respect in this town.

Lisa sits herself in the most secluded corner and risks a glance to left and right with her segmented eyes before she unrolls her long tongue from between her lips and sucks the whiskey up in two quick slurps. She coughs, trilling like a grasshopper, and then sets the empty glass down with her multi-jointed fingers. "Damn," she splutters, sounding astonished at how strong the liquor is. "Remind me to stick to Shirley Temples in future. That stuff is nuclear."

"Yeah, they don't make it how they used to, do they?" I agree, still feeling the buzz of the whiskey burning through my veins.

"Probably a good thing, Bobby," Emma remarks, sipping her whiskey genteelly. "Otherwise you might drink too much of it and get yourself into a fight." I don't dignify that with any kind of answer except a freezing glare. Emma chuckles, and finishes her whiskey with an amused look on her face. "Let's get out of here, shall we? Staying here is just asking for trouble."

"I agree," I say, finally feeling the burning at the back of my throat beginning to die away. Tossing a handful of coins in the direction of the lady behind the bar, I hop off my stool and then tip my hat to her. "Sorry about the mess," I say, as the three of us leave. "If Jesse comes back, tell him we're out of town, okay?"

"Sure, stranger," the lady says as she picks up a glass and wipes it with a damp cloth. I pretend I don't see her spitting into it to bring out its shine, and then walk out into the bright afternoon sunshine. Across the street, I can see some ladies leaning out of their windows and giving me bedroom eyes. The fact that they're all wearing more make-up than a convention of drag queens and wearing fewer clothes than Jenna Jameson in a heat-wave tells me all I need to know about why they're doing it – and I haven't the time or the money to find out if I'd get what I'd paid for. Besides, I can feel Emma staring a hole in the back of my head, so it's not a good idea to even try.

_Down, boy,_ she sends to me, just to confirm my judgement. _You might catch something._

_Like a knife in the back?_ I ask her, already knowing what the answer is going to be before it comes.

_Probably,_ Emma replies, totally serious. _Although I might be more… creative… and start with 'little Bobby' and his two friends. I think you'd be a wonderful soprano, don't you?_

_Damn, Emma, you really know where to hurt a guy,_ I tell her, a hand straying protectively towards my family jewels as I do so. "We need to get out of here," I say aloud, to change the subject as completely as I can. The hovering camera buzzes annoyingly around my head like a mosquito, as if it's trying to get a heroic close-up of its leading man, and I slap at it with one hand. It takes all my strength to resist the urge to pull one of my pistols and blast it into iron filings, because I'm pretty sure that if I do that, I'll just end up stuck in Hicksville 1895 for the rest of my life. Mojo can be vindictive that way.

Fortunately for us, there's an empty stage-coach across the street, and walking over to it, I pull a handful of coins out of my pocket, hoping that it'll be enough to get us safely out of town. The guy seems pretty keen to take the three of us on, and ushers us all into the carriage once he's been given his money – at which point he was all smiles and couldn't be nice enough to us (everyone's nice when they've got cash in their pockets. Go figure…). He goes to check on the horses, and then calls "Everybody comfortable in there, screwloose?"

_Oh, no…_

"We have to get out of here, now," I say, grabbing the inner handle of the carriage's door before I find out that it's being held closed by something a lot stronger than your average lock. The driver comes back to where we can see him, his body changing shape and shifting so that it grows two extra pairs of arms and a set of form-fitting armour – and a crazy, cracked grin that gives me nothing but bad feelings.

"Time to go for a ride, kiddies," Spiral cackles, and one of her extra limbs snakes out to slap the closest horse on the ass. It shrieks and starts running away from her in terror, along with the other horses tethered to the carriage's harness. "Enjoy yourselves."

The carriage quickly picks up speed, and we're away from the town faster than I can easily process, the terrain around us shifting to barren, dusty red scrubland in almost the blink of an eye. It doesn't take me long to realise that if we don't get out of here we could be taken somewhere even less hospitable than the town, and then we'd be in _really_ big trouble, so I brace myself against the side of the carriage and say "Hold still, guys. I'm just going to try something, okay?" Then I aim a foot at the inside of the door and kick it as hard as I can.

It doesn't budge.

"Nicely done," Emma says sourly, untying her bonnet and throwing it against the seat in front of her. "Any more bright ideas?"

"Actually, yes," I snap. "Lisa, can you dissolve that door away with anything – like with venom, or whatever?"

"No – ah, dammit!" she replies, as she fends off a case falling from the racking above her head with one arm. "Sorry. I'm a pretty useless mutant, really."

"Okay," I mutter, cracking my knuckles and aiming both hands at the door. "Let's try this again." Flexing my fingers, I shoot a concentrated layer of ice onto the inside of the door, freezing it solid – and hopefully making it easier to break. Bracing myself again, I kick the door a little harder than before, sending cracks racing across its surface and making the wood complain loudly. _That's a start,_ I think, before I move around so that I can put my full weight against it. Icing up my shoulder so I've got at least a little bit of protection, I throw myself against the door and hear it cracking even more._ One more push ought to do it…_

Throwing my full weight against the door for a third time, I hear the hinges creaking loudly as the door finally swings open. "Right," I say, breathing hard. "Now all we have to do is get this thing to stop. Emma, can you do the honours?"

Emma scowls. "I'm insulted that you even asked me that question, Drake." Then she puts her fingers to her temples, closes her eyes, and begins to try and calm the horses down. She's only just begun before she frowns and opens her eyes again. "Damn it," she snarls. "They're too afraid to listen to me – I think I'm going to have to do this the hard way. I'd hold onto something if I were you." She closes her eyes again, and begins muttering something under her breath.

Suddenly there's a violent lurch, and the carriage begins tipping to one side, like it's had half its quota of wheels removed. It slams into the ground with a crash, and I hear Emma scream loudly, just after the tell-tale sound of bone snapping fills my ears. I'm too stunned to do anything about it until my head clears from the impact, and then I blink once or twice to help me see what's going on. Emma and Lisa are sprawled at the other end of the carriage, and Emma is screaming because her right arm is hanging limply from her shoulder, and her forearm is bent in half, exactly where it shouldn't bend. And as if that weren't enough, a bloody shard of white bone is jabbing through her sleeve. "Damn it!" she screams, grabbing at her shattered arm with her other hand. "This is all your fault, Drake!"

"It's okay, Emma – we'll get you out of here," I say, trying to sound positive now that a straightforward sideways exit has become a slightly more difficult vertical climb, and ignoring my opportunity to point out that if Emma hadn't used her powers, we wouldn't be in this position (somehow, I don't get the feeling it would be all that appropriate). "Hold still, okay? Don't move around too much or you'll –"

"Shut up!" Emma howls, tears streaming out of the corners of her eyes. "Shut up! Get me out of here!"

"Okay. Okay, Emma, hold still," I tell her again, trying to keep as calm as I can and hoping that it might rub off on my girlfriend in the process. "Lisa, you get ready to take hold of her legs."

"What?" Lisa asks, still sounding a little shell-shocked over what's just happened. "What can I do?"

"Simple," I say, gesturing to the open door above us with a single extended finger. "I'm going to climb out and try to pull Emma up after me, and I'm going to need you to help me support her weight, okay?"

Lisa nods. "O-okay," she mumbles, still rooted to the spot by the blood soaking through Emma's ripped sleeve and pooling on the floor of the carriage. Grabbing her by the shoulders, I get her to focus on my eyes and nothing else.

"Stay sharp, Lisa – I can't have you cracking up on me now, all right?" She nods then, quiet determination writing itself onto her face. "Good. Now get ready…" Turning away from both women, I stand and grab the edge of the door, pulling myself up and out onto the side of the carriage. When I'm out, I can see why we ended up like this – all four horses are sprawled on the dusty ground, their harness cleanly snapped off where the carriage went over too far for it to follow. _Can't worry about that now…_ Looking down at Lisa and Emma, I nod encouragingly and hold out my hands. "Come on up, guys - the weather's great."

"Shut up, Drake," Emma hisses through clenched teeth, before she steps just underneath the open door and lets me begin lifting her, with Lisa's arms wrapped around her legs so that she's not in any danger of falling. It's hard, but eventually we get her up and sat down on the side of the carriage. When she's sure that Emma's safe, Lisa climbs up herself and sits down next to us…

… and that's when the next problem hits me. Emma's arm is broken in at least one place, her shoulder is obviously dislocated, and medical care at this point in time is limited to hacking faulty bits off and stitching the holes back up again. I guess we'll have to make do the best we can. "Hold still, Emma," I say. "I'll make you a sling." Pulling my shirt out from my pants, I begin tearing a strip of cloth off when Lisa puts a hand on my wrist.

"Wait," she says. "Maybe I can help you after all." She reaches up to her mouth with both hands, and begins pulling long strings of mucus out from two small, almost unnoticeable glands at either side of her lips. When she has two handfuls of the stuff, she notices both Emma and me looking at her in shock. "Don't worry," she says, as if to answer our unspoken questions, "this stuff will dry rock solid after about five minutes. It's as good a cast as you're going to get out here."

"You have _got_ to be joking," Emma snarls, pain colouring her every word. "If you think I'm going to let you put that on my arm –"

"_Look,_ honey," Lisa snaps, suddenly angry, "don't argue with me, all right? Count yourself lucky you don't have to sleep in this stuff like I do."

"What?" Emma gasps, tears of agony mixing with her surprise and slipping down her sweat-streaked face. "What do you mean?" Lisa half-smiles and holds up the handfuls of mucus as if they're gold trophies.

"I have to make a cocoon every night, just to keep my wings from snapping off when I'm sleeping," she explains. "Trust me, it's strong enough for what I'm suggesting. Now hold still – and brace yourself, because I can promise you this is _damn _sure going to hurt." Crushing the two handfuls of mucus into one squishy lump and handing it to me, she reaches down and quickly pushes Emma's broken bone back inside her arm.

Emma screams again, and I can feel her pain so intensely that I almost pass out. Lord knows how bad it was for her.

"Quickly," Lisa says, pointing with one of her long fingers at Emma's arm and glancing up at me, her compound eyes gone wide as saucers. "Spread a layer over the wound – that'll keep it from going bad." Kneeling beside her, I dip my fingertips into the slimy handful that she gave me and awkwardly cover Emma's forearm with it, watching Emma bite her lip until it bleeds to stop herself from crying out. Then, Lisa takes back what she gave me and begins spinning new strands to back it up, weaving them around Emma's arm in many different layers. When she's finished, she smiles at Emma and nods towards her handiwork. "See? Told you it'd work."

Emma moves her arm a little, winces once or twice, and then tries to push herself to her feet. Quickly, I grab her uninjured arm gently but firmly, and help her to stand. When she's able to stand by herself, she shrugs me off with an irritated look on her face. "I don't need your help now, Drake," she snaps. "Let me go." I can tell that she's just trying to win back a little bit of her dignity through the pain she's in, so I let that one slide. Just then Emma turns her head to look at something in the distance, her expression going distant for a second or two.

"What is it, Emma?" I ask, concerned.

"We're not alone out here," she announces, narrowing her eyes, and pointing behind me to a rapidly approaching cloud of dust.

"Come on," I say, gesturing to Lisa to get close to me. "We can get out of here if I use an ice-slide –" Emma shakes her head.

"No, you won't," she says. "They're moving too fast for you to get away from them. And do you really think they won't shoot you in the back if it suits them?"

"Good point," I say. "Get behind me, Emma. I don't want you getting hurt any more."

It doesn't take long before Emma's assessment of the situation quickly becomes reality, and the three of us are surrounded by men on horseback. The leader gets off his horse, pulls down the neckerchief covering his face, and grins a nasty, gap-toothed smile – and that's when my stomach does a few backflips.

"Well, well, well…" he says, an evil light gleaming in his eye. "Look who it is. Looks like it's my turn to be the big man now, boy."


	4. Ahoy There!

**_Bobby & Emma's Excellent Adventure_**

**_Chapter Four: Ahoy There!_**

Some days, things seem to go from bad to worse. Like today, for instance.

Just a moment ago, my girlfriend broke her arm and dislocated her shoulder after our stagecoach crashed, and before I could do anything to really figure out what to do about it, we get completely surrounded by the gang of the guy I humiliated in a bar earlier today – who just happened to be Jesse James, the outlaw and general all-round nasty piece of work.

Yeah. Right now, there's nothing I'd rather do than find a nice warm bed, crawl under the covers and pretend none of this ever happened. Unfortunately, though, seems like Jesse here isn't going to give me that luxury – and I can't rely on Emma to lay him or the rest of his gang out with a telepathic sucker-punch, either, since she's too busy trying not to cry from the pain of her arm.

_This sucks…_

"You listenin' to me, boy?" Jesse says, unholstering his Smith & Wesson and pointing it at me. "Nobody disrespects me and gets away with it. You're gonna die for what you did, you little bastard." Then he sneers at Emma and Lisa and raises his eyebrows. "Then again, maybe I'll take your womenfolk first, just so you can watch 'em scream their little hearts out. How 'bout it, sweetheart?" He walks over to Emma and cups her sweat-soaked chin in his dirty hand, leering at her like she's a Hollywood hooker. Through the pain, Emma finds enough strength to sneer back at him, her expression going black as thunder.

"I'd rather die," she hisses back. In response, Jesse slaps her across the face, hard and shoves her down to the ground so that she sprawls in the dirt. Fortunately, Lisa's mucus-cast stays intact, so her arm isn't damaged any further, but the impact knocks the wind out of her and she has to take a few moments to get her breath back.

"Don't tempt me, princess," Jesse snarls at her, before he moves over to Lisa, her face still hidden by the purple bonnet she's wearing. "Now… what do we have here?" he says thoughtfully, pulling the bonnet off her head in one rough movement and tearing the silk tying it under her chin. Lisa flinches as her face is revealed, her long black hair falling around her half-lidded compound eyes and the sun's reflection beginning to send ripples of colour across her rainbow skin. "Jesus," Jesse exclaims, sounding genuinely shocked. "What the fuck _are_ you?"

"Santa Claus," Lisa replies, before spitting a large wad of the thick, gooey mucus from her mouth glands directly into his eyes. That's all the distraction I need to ice up, bulking up my body by about a hundred pounds and tearing myself free of the two guys holding me. As they stumble backwards, looking just as stunned as their boss did a second ago, I aim a couple of blasts of ice at their feet so that they're pinned to the spot. Jesse is still screeching like Banshee with a stubbed toe, trying to clear his eyes of the muck that Lisa sprayed into them, so I leave him for the moment and make a mental count of how many guys we've got to get through before we can make a decent escape attempt. By my best estimate, we're facing about ten or twelve armed men, and they're looking like they were spoiling for a fight since they left New Mexico on a day return ticket. I can hear the camera Mojo sent after us still whirring around trying to get the best shot of the three of us, but I have to put that distraction out of my mind for now. Surviving is far more important at this point.

With that in mind, I punch the nearest guy in the stomach and then drop him to the ground with a kick to the side of the head. I can see a couple of others going for their six-shooters, so I quickly freeze them up so that their barrels are totally sealed and then knock them out with a couple of concentrated ice-blasts. The gang's numbers advantage is slipping away, and it gets worse for them when Emma finds the strength of will to mind-blast the two men approaching her. When the psychic energy stops crackling around their heads, they fall to the dusty ground, drooling like babies and acting as if they've suddenly regressed in age about thirty years.

Emma catches me looking at her in concern, and she simply raises her right eyebrow in a moment of contempt. "I don't need you looking out for me, Drake," she says through gritted teeth, before she nods in my direction. I hear a thump, and turn to see a guy crumpled in a boneless heap. "It seems to me like you need somebody watching out for _you_, wouldn't you say?"

"Don't get smart," I tell her, too busy jamming my fist into the gut of a hoodlum to really be irritated. Spraying a thick layer of ice over the guy once he's fallen, wheezing as the breath is driven from his lungs, I make sure he can't get back up again by freezing his arms and legs together. At the same time, Lisa backhands a guy with one fist, and I see him tumbling away under the force of the blow.

"What?" she says quickly, rubbing her knuckles for a second or two. "I take self-defence classes."

And it's right then that I notice that we're down to just one guy still standing – Jesse James himself. Everyone else is either knocked out cold, busy picking up their own teeth, or has headed for the hills. I pick up a dropped shotgun and wait for him to finish cleaning Lisa's goo out of his eyes. It's just then that he notices he's all alone, and I'm pointing a gun at him. The colour leaks out of his face as if someone's opened a drain in his cheeks, and at that, I have to smile.

"All right, you primitive screwhead, listen up," I begin, still keeping the gun pointed at him. _This is going to be fun,_ I find myself thinking. "This… is my _boomstick!_ It's a double-barrelled twelve-gauge Remington, made in Michigan. You can find this in the Sporting Goods aisle – it's got a walnut stock, cobalt blue steel, and it retails for about a hundred and nine ninety five. Shop smart – shop S-Mart! _You got that!"_ From the expression on his face, Jesse's initial fear has vanished, and has been replaced by a real sense of total confusion (hell, I'd be confused if some guy I'd never met before started saying stuff like this after beating up almost my entire gang. The fact that I still look like Frosty the Snowman on steroids can't help much, either).

"What the fuck _are_ you people?" Jesse rasps again, after a long pause.

I shrug. "I wouldn't worry, pal. You won't see anything like us for at least another hundred years, so it's not like you'll ever have to get your stirrups in a knot. But just so you know – we're all mutants, and we're the next step in human evolution."

"That's right," Emma agrees. "And if you do anything to upset us, we'll kill you. So I'd recommend you behave."

Lisa grins. "Yeah – we'll suck your brain out through your nose." She unrolls her long, flexible tongue from her mouth and takes a step towards Jesse, reaching out for him with her multi-jointed hands. He scrambles backwards, the fear in his eyes returning almost instantly, and he pulls out one of his pistols and holds it shakily in front of him.

"Stay back!" he says. "Don't come any closer, or I'll shoot!"

_Do we have to waste our time like this? Can't I just knock him out?_ Emma sends to me impatiently.

_Nah, let's play along for a bit longer - I'm actually enjoying this,_ I reply. "You wanna shoot at us, buddy?" I say aloud. "Let's think this through for a moment here – I've got my boomstick pointed right at you. You miss, and your face is going to be Swiss cheese – and for all you know, we could all be bullet-proof."

"Shoot him," Lisa says, chuckling and giving Jesse a wide, mocking smile. "Make sure you go for somewhere lower than the head, though – I want my brains kept intact. And besides, buckshot kinda ruins the flavour." She unfolds one of her long hands, reaching towards Jesse with chitin-tipped fingers. "Boo," she says, watching Jesse flinch away from her and laughing even more.

_She's certainly enjoying this, isn't she?_ Emma remarks to me, surprise clear in her psychic voice. _Perhaps a little too much._

_Are you really all that surprised?_ I ask her, remembering to keep my shotgun poised and aimed right at Jesse's chest._ She's had to spend her whole life trying to _avoid_ being feared – at least now she can have a little fun with the idea. I mean it's not like she's _really_ going to eat his brains, is it?_

_All right – but if this all goes wrong, I'll know exactly who to blame,_ Emma fires back at me. Fortunately, Lisa proves me right by drawing back and folding her arms.

"I changed my mind," she says, glaring at Jesse as he sweats out a lake in front of us. "I'm not hungry."

Just then, I let the shotgun slip down a little, and it's then that Jesse takes his chance. He leaps forward and slams the pistol in his hand into my jaw, knocking white stars across my eyes and making the world turn upside down. My eyes start working again after a second or two – just in time to see Jesse about to smash both of his hands right into my face. I wait for the blow to strike (I figure it won't do much more than sting me while I'm iced up – if that), but it never does. Looking to my right, I can see Emma holding out a finger to freeze him in place.

"Better think of something quickly, Drake – I can't hold him like this for long," Emma says through gritted teeth. "If I weren't in such bad condition, it'd be a different story, but –"

"I'm on it," Lisa interrupts, quickly slapping some more of her mucus secretions all over Jesse's arms and legs (and over his mouth for good measure, too). "Keep him like this for a couple of minutes while the mucus sets. Then we can get the hell out of here."

Emma nods, and strains against the pain that I can feel building in her head for as long as she can, and when he can't move, I push him off me and then point at him lying on the ground. "How long does this stuff last?"

"About eight hours – maybe ten if I use enough of it," Lisa replies. "He'll be able to get out of it just fine once it goes brittle, if that's what you're worried about." Then she gestures at the ground around us. "What about us? What are we gonna do now?"

"I think you know the answer to that, screwloose," says a voice from out of nowhere, although I'd bet dollars to doughnuts it's being projected from the camera that's still buzzing around us. Sure enough, a wormhole opens out of thin air next to Lisa, and Spiral steps through, wearing an eye patch and carrying a treasure chest with two of her arms, with a small green bird sat on her shoulder. "Time to set sail on the open seas!"

"When is this going to end, Spiral?" I say, knowing even as I speak that I won't get a straight answer out of this loon.

"It's sweeps week," Spiral chuckles, as if that explains everything. "You think this is going to end any time soon, when it's giving Lord Mojo his highest ratings for a dozen seasons? Prepare to walk the plank, landlubbers!" Then, she clicks her fingers, and the familiar sinking feeling I've been nursing in my guts takes over as the air around us shows an equally familiar static buzz…

… and then it's all over, and the three of us are stood on the wooden deck of a ship. I'm dressed in a striped jersey and short pants with white leggings and buckles shoes, and Emma and Lisa… well, let's just say that they're not leaving much to the imagination at chest level. Their ruffled dresses (white for Emma, red for Lisa) are so tight that their breasts are shoved together and show more cleavage than I'd have ever thought possible, and both of them are wearing full white make-up on their faces, each with two rosy cheeks painted onto them. And not only that, but their hair is curled and piled up onto their heads, held in place by whalebone clips.

Emma is the first to say something, as I'd expected. "Oh, this is getting beyond a joke now. Am I the only one who's sick and tired of being used as a dress-maker's mannequin?"

"Nope," Lisa replies as she's examining her dress in disgust, and rubbing cautiously at the make-up caking her face. "I look like I fell out of the Mardi Gras."

"Avast there, ye lily-livered swine!" says a voice that makes us all jerk our heads around to see who else is here, and we see a big, muscular man with a black beard reaching almost down to his waist, flaming knots of gunpowder tied into it at regular intervals. If he weren't holding out a cutlass that's almost equal to the length of his arm, I'd be tempted to laugh. "What are ye damned cowardly dogs doing on my ship?"

"Um… just passing through?" I say, hoping to avoid any trouble by using the same excuse as I did at the saloon. "We don't want to cause you nice fellas any problems, after all, so if you'll just –"

"Quiet, you little fool," the pirate says, squinting at me with both of his black, piggy eyes. "I don't remember taking any new crew on board at Southampton… and I certainly don't recall bringing two females on board, either. Women are bad luck."

"Let me guess, you're single?" Lisa spits back at him, contempt oozing out of her words. The pirate glares at her.

"I'd mind my words if I were you, miss," he begins in a low, dangerous tone. "You want to remember whose ship you're on at the moment. If you annoy me any further, I can throw you to the sharks and have Satan and his angels fight over what those grey devils leave behind."

Lisa gulps. "Yes, sir," she says, quickly realising that she's on a losing streak here, and that being eaten by a shark isn't exactly at the top of her "to do" list.

Then, the big pirate nods to some of his deck crew and says "Throw these knaves down in the bilge and let them fight the other rats for food." He sniggers, cupping Lisa's chin in his huge, callused hand. "I think you'll change your tune once you've been down there a few hours, little flower."

Three other pirates grab us and march us towards a door in the deck that, when it's opened, leads us down into the belly of the ship. _Bobby, you do realise I can stun these men and have us free in no time? _Emma sends to me.

_Yeah, I know that, Emma, but where are we going to go? For all we know, we could be miles from anywhere, and without a crew, this ship could drift for days. Let's just see what's going on before we do anything dumb, okay? Don't want a repeat of your arm, after all._

Emma scowls at me, wincing as one of the pirates grabs a little too tightly at her cast, and then nods her head. _All right, Bobby, we'll play it your way. For now._

_Good girl,_ I say. _When the time comes, I promise you can go nuts on these guys._

We're pushed down another few flights of stairs, Emma almost falling into a pile of rotted meat as her foot finds a flaw in the decking, and eventually we reach a stinking door that has flies and stench rising from it almost equally.

"Enjoy your stay," one of the pirates chuckles as he pushes me in. I land face-first into thick, fetid water that tastes like rotten apples. Standing, I spit as much of the flavour of it out of my mouth as I can, and try to see what I can see through the gloom. There's no light to speak of, except a few stray shafts of light coming through holes in the boards of the ship a way above my head (and even that's being kind). All I can hear are chittering rats splashing through the muck, and it's not the best feeling to have. The big guy said something about "fighting the other rats for food"… but there doesn't seem to be enough of that down here to sustain the number of rats I can hear crawling around.

_I really don't like the look of this…_

Suddenly, I hear a clattering sound down at the other end of the ship, and try to see what's making it through the murky darkness. The low light doesn't help, and for a moment I wish I had a lighter or something else to make a flame. Suddenly I have a flash of inspiration and start patting down my pockets to see what I can find (hey, if Spiral gave me six-shooters in the Wild West, maybe she's left me something else here). Sure enough, I find a small tinderbox and a flint, along with some short lengths of wood that I guess are supposed to be like matches. They're dry, and once the flint has caught, light easily as well.

"Oh God," Lisa says, after the flame starts chasing away the shadows. "Look." She points off into the retreating darkness, and just before the fire dies, I see what it was that got her so spooked.

Skeletons. Dozens of them.

And every one of them _upright and walking._

Emma swallows hard, and I can feel her slipping her good hand into mine. I squeeze it hard, as much to reassure myself as to reassure her. A shiver runs down my spine as I hear thin, ghostly voices start howling things like "Food!" or "Battle!", and I instinctively ice myself up and spread a thick wall of frozen water across the inside of the ship's hull. It won't keep the boneheads out for ever, but it'll at least give us some thinking space.

"Emma, can you do anything about those guys?" I say, not feeling that confident about the possible answers.

"I can't feel anything out there," Emma says, a frown creasing across her forehead. "If I can't feel them, then there's nothing I can grab hold of. Find me a hammer and I'll still smash them into kitty litter, though."

"I could do with one of those, too," Lisa adds, balling her fists and listening to the skeletons start hammering my ice wall with their skinless hands. "Hell, I'd even settle for a staple gun right now."

The ice wall starts to crack, and even though I keep reinforcing it wherever I can see breaks forming, there are just too many of the skeletons for me to make any kind of permanent repairs, and they come crashing through, waving rusty blades and howling curses.

"Well, here we are," I breathe, before a sudden flash of inspiration hits me. "Lost in time."

"Not now, Bobby," Emma says, realising where I'm going.

"Surrounded by evil," I continue, as the skeletons pour forwards.

"Damn it, not _now_!" Emma screams as bony fingers start reaching for her.

"Low on gas," I say, seeing the black pits of the skeletons' eye sockets get closer and closer, before a wide grin plasters itself across my face. "_Groovy…_"


	5. A Piece Of The Action

**__**

**_Bobby & Emma's Excellent Adventure_**

**_Chapter Five: A Piece Of The Action_**

"You girls get behind me!" I yell, throwing a hard right cross into the face of a skeleton that's got too close to us, my iced-up hand shattering its jaw and spraying rotten teeth everywhere like blackened raindrops, and then using the respite to spray another few dozen layers of ice onto the barricade I'm trying to rebuild before the rest of the skeletons overwhelm us. "Try and get that door open before we get cornered!"

"We _are_ cornered, Drake!" Emma screams, reluctantly using her hardened resin cast as a weapon to knock the skull off the bony neck of another skeleton. Meanwhile, Lisa jams her shoulder into the hatch behind us, pushing against it with every ounce of her strength and coming up short again.

"It won't budge," she gasps. Emma scowls and then narrows her eyes, moving towards the hatch and looking as if she's trying to see through the thin gaps in the wooden hatchway.

"Got you," she says triumphantly, and then the hatch, miraculously, begins to open. As it does so, I can see a drooling pirate, his red shirt stained with food, beer and ropes of spittle, throwing aside the wooden block that had been barring the door. Emma moves quickly towards the door and scrambles up the stairs after Lisa, while I stay down for just another few seconds, making sure that the skeletons are stuck behind the ice-wall for the moment. When the door's shut and securely fastened, Emma folds her arms and gives me a triumphant look. "You didn't say I couldn't get one of them, Bobby. And it made more sense to do that than to go out in a blaze of glory, too." She smirks. "Although I'm sure you'd have preferred to do that, wouldn't you… Ash."

The fact that Emma got the reference makes me proud. Apparently we're rubbing off on each other more than I thought... "Well done, Emma. You've taken your first step into a larger world." Emma raises an eyebrow archly, and then walks away from the trapdoor without saying another word.

"Looks like somebody's in the dog-house," Lisa says with a wry grin. "You guys seem to do this 'angry at each other' thing a lot – what do you see in that woman?"

"She's great at _Halo_," I reply. "But don't tell her I told you that – she's supposed to be totally above video games." Rubbing my hand against the back of my neck, I continue "Besides, haven't you ever heard the saying 'opposites attract'? That's Emma and me in a nutshell. We don't agree on everything, sure, but that's the fun of it – it keeps the spark alive if we can disagree on a few things now and again, you know?" A smile flutters across my lips then, briefly. "Besides, Emma's very… inventive… in the bedroom. She –"

Lisa makes a face and holds up one long-fingered hand. "Okay, hot-shot, I get the picture. You don't have to go into any more detail."

Taking the hint, I follow quickly in Emma's footsteps and walk down the dingy corridor in front of us, keeping alert and ready to spring into action at a moment's notice. Icing up just in case we get caught by surprise seems like a good idea, so I quickly make myself an ice-shell and try to keep myself on my toes. Catching up to Emma, I whisper "We need to get above deck as quickly as possible."

"Good plan," Emma says sourly. "Any more _genius_ ideas up your sleeve?"

I grin despite myself. "A few. But I don't think we have any laser pistols around, so they'll have to wait."

Emma purses her lips. "I see. Remind me never to invest in any of your business ventures, Bobby."

I'm about to say something in reply, but just then, we see a set of stairs leading upwards, with telltale shafts of light coming from above. Moving quickly towards them, I clamber upwards to check the coast is clear (Emma could probably do it from where she's standing, but I figure she's got enough to deal with right now. Besides, it makes this seem more like a fun little holiday if I can do adventurous things like searching out enemies).

"Are we safe?" Lisa asks as she reaches the two us. Looking down at her, I shake my head and then jerk a thumb up towards the open hatch.

"No. There's about five or six guys around above decks – and that's just around the door. Emma, can you disguise us?"

"I can try," Emma replies, before she frowns and waves her hands towards Lisa and me in turn. "All right. The pirates should see each of us as one of their own now. If the illusion slips, leave it to me."

I shrug. "Okay, Emma, but if this goes wrong and we all get killed, don't think I won't spend the rest of eternity bugging the hell out of you."

"I don't doubt it. Now come on, Bobby – time to make a move."

With that, Emma climbs the steps into the upper deck, and the salty breeze hits me in the face as I follow her upwards. Fortunately, the big pirate we saw earlier isn't anywhere in sight, so that's a relief. Maybe he's off throwing his crew to the sharks. Tiptoeing up to one of the crew – the guy holding the wheel, in fact – I try and look as casual as possible, sticking my hands in my pockets and whistling a happy little tune as I do so. "So… where we headed?" I ask him in what I'm hoping is a relaxed tone.

The pirate gives me a disbelieving look out of his one good eye. "Surely ye haven't forgotten we're on a trip to the Spanish Main?" he sneers, before he bellows with laughter and claps me on the shoulder. "I shall never get tired of new crew!" Then he reaches into a pocket and fishes out a lump of something brown and hard, which has small things wriggling at its edges. "Here. Want some?"

"Uh… sure," I say, taking the lump and taking a small bite – and nearly breaking my teeth in the process. The biscuit is harder than concrete, and tastes like it, too. The wriggling things and I don't meet this time, so I hand the biscuit back to the guy before I get bitten. He grins again, his gap-toothed smile thick with black decay, and stuffs the lump back into a pocket, before he spits a thick glob of saliva onto the deck and starts singing a tuneless song to himself.

_Charming fella, isn't he?_ I think in Emma's direction.

_Absolutely,_ Emma replies. _It's a wonder I haven't torn off my clothes and offered myself to him before now, actually._

_ Please don't put images like that in my head, Emma,_ I tell her, feeling my stomach turn over just at the thought of such a thing. _My doctor says I have to _avoid_ puking, not do it ten times in a row…_

_ Sorry, Bobby,_ Emma chuckles. _I forgot you were so sensitive –_ Just then, I feel a stab of pain lancing across our link, and before I can do anything else, I see the pirate standing next to me take a step backwards as the illusion around me fades away, and I'm revealed as the guy that ought to have been stuck in the bottom of the ship with a bunch of extras from _Army Of Darkness._ He pulls his cutlass, and I'm ready to start defending myself when Emma arrives at my side and waves her good hand briefly through the air, her face concentrating totally on fixing her lapse in concentration.

"You don't need to do that," she says firmly.

"I don't need to do that," the pirate repeats, a line of brown drool dividing his chin in half.

"We aren't the prisoners you're looking for," Emma continues.

"You aren't the prisoners I'm looking for," follows the pirate.

"We can go about our business."

"You can go about your business."

Emma smiles. "Move along."

"Move along."

The pirate stumbles off then, looking like he's high on something before he collapses in a ragged heap on the other side of the deck. But that's not what I'm really concerned about. What really worries me is that Emma just quoted _Star Wars _almost word for word. I mean, I'm supposed to be the joker here, and seeing Emma take that role is pretty unnerving.

"What was that all about, Emma?" I ask her, trying not to sound too stunned.

"The Frost can have a strong influence on the weak-minded," Emma chuckles, running her uninjured fingers down my cheek before kissing me gently on the lips. "And besides, who said you had to be the one who had all the fun? You're not the only one who likes movies, you know."

"Yeah, I know, but… _Star Wars_? You like _Star Wars_? _You?_"

"I love _Star Wars_, Bobby. I know what you're thinking - why didn't I tell you this before?" She wrinkles her nose at me. "You never asked."

I raise my eyebrows as high as they'll go, surprised by the news that Emma and I have something else in common. "Wait a minute, here. So if I asked you to dress up like Princess Leia –"

"– I'd tell you to do it yourself," Emma cuts in. "There's no way you'd get me to dress up in a metal bikini, I can tell you that."

"Too much information," Lisa chimes in, before she points at the wheel of the ship and says "You think maybe we should take the wheel before we go off course?"

"Perhaps we ought to deal with them first," Emma says, and points to the hatch we just came out of. Pirates are flooding out of it with their swords drawn – but they're not what Emma is worried about. Following the pirates are the skeletons I thought we'd managed to leave behind.

"Damn it!" Lisa cries, angrily. "How'd they get loose?"

I shrug. "My guess is, these guys decided to check if we were bone-meal, and their little pets decided to go on a guided tour of this tub." Icing up, I nod towards the knot of pirates and smile faintly. "You guys think we should help them out, or not?"

"Give me a minute," Lisa says, looking down at her long dress and grabbing a handful of fabric. Then, she pulls hard and tears it off so it's above her knees. "Being able to move might help, you know?"

"Good idea," Emma agrees, doing the same to her outfit – although with a bit more difficulty, considering she's only got the one good hand. I stand back even though I want to help her, because I know she'll just shrug me off if I go anywhere near her. Emma's a proud girl, and it pays to remember that if you don't want to end up having to be fed through a tube. The two girls start moving towards the enemy, but I hang back for a second, glancing at what the skeletons are holding in their bony hands – rusty cutlasses, billhooks and cleavers are just a few of the weapons they're using to attack their former masters.

_Time to even the score a little…_

Holding out one of my hands, I create a hard cylinder of ice that is about nine inches from top to bottom, and then run after the girls. When I'm caught up to them, I see that they've grabbed fallen weapons from a couple of dead pirates and are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of our former captors. Then, standing next to Emma, I grip the ice-cylinder in both hands and wait for the skeletons to reach us.

"Please tell me that's not what I think it is, Bobby," Emma says.

"This is my father's lightsabre," I tell her, and I can already feel her dismay. "This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight: not as clumsy or random as an evil mutant – an elegant weapon, for a more civilised age." Then, holding out the cylinder, I make a sharp blade spring from the top edge, its temperature approaching absolute zero. Anything that it touches will likely get burned so badly from the cold that it'll shatter, which is sort of the effect I was hoping for.

"You're insane, Robert Drake," Emma says, rolling her eyes.

I grin, and ready my blade as the skeletons swarm closer. "Insane, schminsane – I'm a Jedi, like my father before me."

"You're a stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf herder, is what you are," Emma retorts, gripping her own weapon in her good hand.

"Hey, who's scruffy-looking? You didn't say that last night, Emma," I tell her, remembering for a moment that the tiny camera is still buzzing around our heads. If that doesn't pay Emma back for what she said about me earlier, I don't know what will.

Then, thinking is the last thing on my mind, as the skeletons crash against our wall of steel. Metal clangs off metal, the sharp crack of splintering bone coming along with it. I duck out of the way of a brown, pitted blade and hack my ice-sabre through the exposed spine of my attacker. Like I'd suspected, the chill of the weapon freezes and then shatters the bone, making my bony enemy fall in two halves on the deck. Icing up my boot, I hammer it down twice onto the creature's skull, smashing it into a dozen pieces and scattering them all over the deck. Jinking out of the way of another wild slash, I kick out and send the skeleton flying so that it slams into the main mast and has its bones thrown in every direction. _That's two for two,_ I think, satisfied. _Good start, Bobby._

Beside me, I can see Lisa twirling her sword expertly, driving it into the eye-socket of one of the few skeletons wearing a rotten, hole-riddled set of clothes and then hooking the skull off its neck, so that it flies through the air and then plummets into the ocean. The body sways for a second or two, and then collapses in a heap. Emma, meanwhile, is doing just as well, avoiding the swipes of swords and axes as best she can before swinging her sword in a wide arc and slicing the ribcages of two skeletons in half. "Good one, Emma!" I call to her encouragingly.

"Thank you, Drake," she shouts back. "Watch out on your left!" I turn to see what she means – just in time to see a jagged, broken dagger blade sweeping down towards me. Icing up to absorb the blow just in case I'm not fast enough, I bring my sword up to counter, but somebody else's sword deflects it.

A sword being held by cybernetic fingers.

"Having fun, screwloose?" Spiral cackles, waving her hands and causing the ship around us to melt away, so that the all-too-familiar static background appears again. This time, she's dressed like a gangster's moll from the Twenties, giving me an uncomfortable feeling about where she's going to send us next.

Taking a moment to get my breath back, and trying not to let my worries come to the surface, I nod. "Yeah, I was, actually… until you turned up."

Spiral makes a clucking noise at the front of her mouth, wagging the forefingers of all her six hands at me. "Naughty, naughty, screwloose – you ought to mind your manners." She narrows her eyes. "Remember where you are. You wouldn't want to end up… _cancelled_, would you? Being stuck in reruns is no fun at all." She clicks her fingers and the world shimmers around me. When the glow fades, I can see that my pirate clothes are gone, and I'm dressed in a sharp pin-striped suit and spats, with a white shirt and black tie, and Emma and Lisa have been given short dresses complete with shorter haircuts and headdresses.

"What is this?" Emma shrieks angrily, grabbing at her new hairstyle with furious fingers. "What have you done to me!"

Spiral chuckles. "If that's the worst thing that happens to you, Blondie, be grateful. It'll all be fixed by the time we're finished with you anyway, so don't worry." Then she waves her upper right hand and the static fades. "Every time you think you're out, they pull you back in. This is an offer you can't refuse…" Then she vanishes, and we're left to see what we're up against on our own.

Looking around us, I can see that we're outside a busy bar, with lousy piano music tinkling away through the windows. The cars outside the place look like Model T Fords, all of them painted pitch-black with no exceptions. _Better find out more about where we are,_ I think, _even if it's just to confirm what I already know._ I jerk a thumb towards the bar. "You girls want another drink?" I ask. Emma scowls.

"The last time you ordered a drink, Drake, you got into a fight with Jesse James."

I grin. "Yeah, I know. Wasn't it fun?" Then, walking over to the door and pushing it open a little, I glance indoors at the people inside and whistle in disbelief. "Wow. Talk about your wretched hives of scum and villainy. These guys could make Greedo look like a chartered accountant."

Lisa follows my gaze and sees the smoky interior of the bar for herself. "Maybe I should wait outside. Those guys have guns, and I don't think they'll see me in the same way you guys do. I don't want to end up as a trophy on a wall, you know?"

"Lisa," I begin, "I think the fact that you survived Bluebeard and his pals without anything to hide your face says more than you can imagine. Either Spiral's decided to disguise you, or you're just too bad-ass to let things get on top of you. Which do you think is more likely?"

"A little from Column A, a little from Column B?" Lisa smiles – and not for the first time, I notice that she's got a really pretty smile when she puts her mind to it. Makes me wonder why she's so shy, really.

"Time's a-wasting, Drake," Emma says impatiently, sliding past me through the door of the speakeasy, and leading me to the bar by the hand, as if I'm some kind of badly-behaved child – which I guess I am, in a way. As the bartender arrives to see what we want, Emma holds out a handful of dollar bills that she has dug out of the purse which came with her dress, and says "Three glasses of your best wine, please."

"Sure, lady – comin' right up," the bartender says, and pulls three small glasses off the shelf behind him before pouring some red liquid into them. When he's done, Emma hands two of them to Lisa and me, before taking a sip herself – and nearly choking on the stuff.

"My God," she splutters. "So this is Prohibition – wine that could melt your brain and bars fuller than churches." She smiles sourly. "Don't you just love democracy in action?"

"Oh yeah," I reply, sipping from my own glass and feeling exactly the same way as Emma did a moment before. Just then, though, there's a noise at the door, and several big men wearing suits and carrying violin cases come in from the cold, looking like they could pick a fight with the next guy to tread on their toes accidentally.

_The more things change…_

The men all walk up to the bar, and the bartender immediately pours them all a glass of beer without having to be asked. They take their glasses and walk over to a table, which is quickly vacated by the people who'd been sitting there only a moment before, and the bar only seems to let out a collective breath when they start talking and laughing amongst themselves.

"Check it out," I whisper. "Looks like these guys are the big movers around here."

"I wouldn't have thought so, Bobby," Emma replies. "They're probably just soldiers for someone else – but these people know that if they cross one of them, then word gets sent up to their boss and then people will start dying."

"That might happen yet," Lisa says, pointing to the entrance of the bar. Another group of sharply dressed men has entered, and the room has gone quiet again. I can see each group of thugs looking at the other like the world's about to end, and I can see the clips on their violin cases being released.

I gulp. "I have a bad feeling about this…"


	6. So Long, Farewell

**_Bobby & Emma's Excellent Adventure_**

**_Chapter Six: So Long, Farewell…_**

The bar is balanced on a knife edge. At any minute the two groups of rival gangsters could start spraying bullets everywhere with those Thompsons of theirs – and that could really make this day worse than it already has been. I glance at Emma with a worried look on my face. _Can you calm this down?_ I think, hoping she'll pick the thought up in amongst all the excitement and terror that's got to be bouncing around her brain – not just her own, but everybody else's as well.

_I'm trying, Bobby,_ she replies, filling me with relief for a second or two, _but at this rate, I'm not going to get very far. These people seem to want a fight no matter how many images of puppies or kittens I put into their minds. It's like trying to stop a shark attack by showing it pictures of bleeding fish. _

_Can't you just push one half of these guys out of here? Maybe that'd work better?_ I suggest, hoping against hope that Emma's still got enough gas in her psychic tank to get us out of one more scrape.

_I can try, but don't expect too much,_ Emma tells me, shrugging her shoulders and then twisting her face up like a pretzel as pain shoots up her arm._ At this rate, I'll need more than a few cups of coffee when we get home._ She puts her hands to her temples and narrows her eyes a little, focusing her gaze on the group of bad guys that just came through the door. Even from a distance, it's obvious when she's taken control of them – their posture changes, the look in their eyes is altered, and they all let their violin cases stay closed. As quickly as they came in, they leave, and the bar is filled with only one group of lowlifes again.

Lisa whistles with relief. "I thought we were in real trouble there," she says, and leans back against the bar so that she can loosen out the knots her shoulders obviously tied themselves into.

I nod in agreement. "Yeah – could have got real ugly, real fast." Then I take a sip of the nuclear fuel that passes for booze in this time. I cough and splutter, trying to clear my throat so that I can speak again. "Damn, this crap is evil," I wheeze. "I think I can still taste the old socks it was stewed in."

Emma chuckles. "Oh, I don't know – I think 'old sock' is a pretty interesting flavour, myself."

"We'd be better off just drinking anti-freeze," I suggest, finishing my glass and shuddering as the taste leaves my mouth. "That way we could just skip to the 'going blind' part pretty quickly, and not have to worry about rotting our taste-buds."

"Sounds like a good idea to me, Bobby," Lisa says as she examines the bottom of her empty glass. "Looks like there are things growing in this. Maybe we should leave?"

Emma stiffens suddenly, and shakes her head. "I don't think that would be a good idea right now," she says hurriedly. "Bobby, ice the front window up. Make it thick, but try to keep it clear."

"What's the matter, Emma?" I ask, a little confused.

"Quickly!" Emma hisses. Shrugging, I hold my hands up and spray a thick layer of ice across the inside of the windows – and it's then that Lisa and I see why Emma was so agitated. A Model T cruises past the window, and one of its passengers stands up in his seat and opens fire with a machine gun. The glass of the front window is smashed, but the thick ice behind it holds firm as everybody in the bar instinctively dives for cover. Even the tough guys sitting in the corner have thrown themselves behind their upturned table, and all of them have unloaded their tommy guns from their cases and are getting ready to go outside and deal out some payback.

"Should we stop them?" Lisa suggests. "They could get people hurt if they start shooting the street up."

"Good idea," I say, icing myself up from head to foot and holding out my hand for Emma to follow us. "You coming, Emma?"

Emma rolls her eyes. "I don't suppose I've got much a choice, have I?"

The three of us get outside in time to see the two groups of hoodlums with their guns drawn. Unless we stop them, there's going to be a lot more than just a hot time in the old town tonight. Looking at the one nearest to me, I can see him tightening his finger on the trigger of his gun, ready to spray lead across the street, so I close my fist and spray a thin coating of ice across his eyes to throw off his aim, before extending a thin stream of ice out towards the gun itself. It collects around the gun's heavy drum magazine and I'm able to yank it out of the guy's hands before he can open fire properly.

"Playtime's over, kid," I say, increasing the size of my right hand with several layers of ice and then crushing the gun's barrel with one simple flex of my fingers. "Now if you don't behave yourself I'll have to take away your candy privileges, too." The guy is understandably angry, and his attention becomes focused totally on me once he's cleared the ice out of his eyes. Oddly, though, there's none of the panicked surprise that's been common in people seeing my ice-form since Mojo sent us on this crazy time-hopping journey – he just looks pissed as hell and ready to plug me one.

Kinda refreshing, in a weird sort of way.

He reaches into his pin-striped jacket for something, and his hand emerges with a Smith & Wesson revolver. He manages to get one shot off, but the thick ice on my hand acts like a flak jacket and absorbs the impact without many problems. "What did I just say?" I tell him, wagging my finger. "No more candy for you, mister. Not until you learn how to behave, anyway."

To my left, I can see Lisa throwing a couple of well-aimed fastballs made up of her glue-like mucus straight at the two hoods trying to close in on her. One splatters in a guy's face, and the other clogs the barrel of his buddy's gun. Either way, they're both out of commission long enough for her to close in and kick one guy right in the teeth and jam a fist into the other thug's gut. They both drop to their knees then, clutching the injured parts of their bodies and grunting loudly. She catches me looking at her and winks one of her big compound eyes. "Doing good, aren't we?" she says brightly, before pointing behind me with one chitin-tipped finger. "Better go help your girlfriend, if you want her to speak to you again."

Turning, I see Emma batting aside a guy's grasping fingers with her good hand while trying to get enough focus to use her powers. _Time to play the knight in shining armour, I guess…_

Holding out my hands, I concentrate and fire a few concentrated ice-blasts at the guy, gluing his legs to the street and pinning his hands to his sides. That gives Emma enough time to reach into his head and switch him off from the inside out. She looks at me with something that looks like gratitude – but if there's one thing I've learned about Emma, it's not to take her at face value. She raises her eyebrows and says "I suppose I owe you a 'thank you', don't I?" She grins. "I'll give it to you when we get home."

I roll my eyes. The Spineless Ones are probably eating that one up on Mojoworld. Fat weirdoes are probably running out of popcorn, too. Turning back the way I came, I can see that the rest of the guys from the car have all made good their escape. Better to leave the ones we caught for the cops, I suppose – it'll make less trouble for us if we can keep this as quiet as possible. "How's your arm?" I ask Emma, still scanning the street for any possible trouble.

Emma walks up beside me, flexing the fingers of her good hand a little, and then looks down at the makeshift cast on her broken arm. "As good as it's going to get until I can get proper medical treatment, I suppose," she says, before a look of inspiration comes across her face. "You know, Drake, seeing as we're in a time that actually has access to things like aspirin and plaster casts, do you think there's an outside chance we could get this fixed?" She looks over at Lisa, who's finished binding the fallen crooks with long, thin strings of her mucus and is walking over to us with her long fingers clenched. "I appreciate this cast you made for me, darling, but I'd rather not go around looking like my wrist got sneezed on by an elephant any longer than I have to. How do you get these things off every morning?"

"I kick them," Lisa replies. "They're usually pretty brittle after eight hours, so it doesn't really need that much effort. Right now, that's probably going to need a saw to get through." She jerks a thumb down the street. "I think I saw some kind of surgery down that way. You want to bet they'll have some tools like that?"

Emma scowls. "You really think I'm going to go and get treatment from a back-alley butcher? That man probably has more experience in digging out bullets than he does in proper medical procedures."

"Look, honey," Lisa sighs, rubbing her brow with one hand, "I don't know if you've noticed, but we don't exactly have a lot of choice. So either you take the chance, or you go without, okay?"

"She does have a point, Em," I say, instinctively knowing that I'm going to regret this later. "I'd take what you can get now, and hope Hank can fix you up properly when we get home."

"You do realise I could brain-wipe the pair of you right now," Emma states flatly, her eyes cold as yesterday's embers. "But, in the interests of peace and harmony, I'll be gracious and leave you with enough brains to get us home."

"Gee, I don't know how we'd manage without you," Lisa says, one of her eyebrows arched as high as it will go. "Now come on. I don't think he'll stay open for much longer."

She walks down the street to the flickering lamp that marks the surgery – such as it is – and knocks on the door. Someone who I guess is the doctor opens the door after stumbling loudly towards it, and I begin to think that maybe Emma's suspicions might have some basis in fact. The guy has at least three days' worth of beard growth, his hair is uncombed, and his shirt is rumpled and looks like it hasn't seen an iron in about a year. "Yes?" he snaps.

"We have someone here who needs medical treatment," I say, pointing towards Emma's injured hand. "We thought you could help us out."

"Payment up front," the doctor says, holding out one blunt-fingered hand. "Three hundred bucks, or you don't get nothin'."

Emma glances towards him, and tips her head slightly to one side. "I don't think that'll be necessary, do you?"

"No, I guess not," he says slowly.

_What, did you actually expect me to _pay_ this troll?_ Emma sends to me. _I'm getting what I need and he won't even remember giving it to me. It's the perfect crime._ She winks at me and then follows the doctor into his dark and pretty grim-looking surgery. He directs Emma to sit down on a chair, and then sits down opposite her.

"What can I do for you?" he says. Emma nods at her arm, and flexes the fingers gently to emphasise the problems she's been having.

"I need this properly set. I've been wearing this stopgap solution for far too long."

The doctor leans closer to her arm and prods Lisa's mucus-cast with one finger. "Jesus. What the hell is this stuff?"

"You… _really_ don't want to know," Emma says. "Just trust me when I say I shall be very glad to get it off me." She sees the doctor start to pick up a scalpel, and shakes her head. "You'll need something bigger than that if you want to cut through it. Something like that over there, for instance." She nods towards a bone-saw that's hanging on a hook on one of the walls. It doesn't look all that clean – in fact I'm pretty sure I can see some dried flecks of blood clinging to its cutting teeth – but I guess it'll be okay if it doesn't cut her skin.

_Not that I'm putting much faith in this guy to be that precise…_

The doctor begins sawing, and the saw's sharp teeth cut through the solidified mucus pretty easily, until he's able to pull it apart and help Emma ease her arm out. Then, he reaches for a proper dressing and drapes that across the wound before binding it all tightly with some bandages and a couple of splints. "I'm afraid I can't make you a proper cast with what I've got here," the doctor says, confirming what Emma had thought might happen, "but I can make sure you'll be okay for as long as you need to be until you can get to a hospital, okay?"

Once Emma's arm is tightly bound up, she stands, examines the doctor's work, and then smiles as broadly as she can (which isn't much, to be honest. I think it goes against the ten commandments of Versace to be that open with your emotions). "Thank you, Doctor," she says, before she walks towards the hallway and the way out of this dirty excuse for a surgery. "I'll be sure to visit you again if I ever need anything else."

We get out onto the street and everything seems to have quietened down. Nobody even takes any notice of the guys lying pinned to the ground. Either they're so used to seeing gangsters taking each other out that it doesn't register with them any more, or they just don't want to get involved because they might get taken out themselves. Then, suddenly, a woman passer-by in a heavy coat stops and kneels by the side of one of the hoods, touching his face with one of her hands. Then she turns her head to look at us, and asks "Did you do this?"

"We didn't have a choice," I tell her as firmly as I can. "They were going to kill each other."

The woman raises an eyebrow. "Who said I was condemning you? These men have been terrorising our neighbourhood for months – it's about time somebody took them to school." She smiles broadly and her eyes begin to shine with an unearthly glow. "It's good television." Then, she stands, casts off her heavy coat, and unfolds her other four arms. "Lord Mojo is very pleased – he thinks you can go home soon." She chuckles insanely then, her head tipping slightly to one side, like a bird looking at a piece of tinfoil. But you're not finished yet, screwloose. We have one more task for you."

"What next?" Emma says, exasperated. "Are we going to have to dress up like knights and joust each other to death – because if we do, I'm not co-operating."

Spiral giggles. "Oh, much better than that, Blondie – much better. This is Lord Mojo's biggest production for years… and you can't end a big production these days without a big song and dance number." She clicks her fingers, and the static display melts in around us once again, leaving us all to wonder where we're being taken next. Spiral seems to sense that, so she continues "Mojoworld awaits us all. Do well there, and you can go home. Don't do your best, and you'll end up cancelled." She snickers. "Wouldn't want to end up like_ Joanie Loves Chachi,_ would you?"

The static fades, and the three of us – all of whom have thankfully been returned to our usual appearance – are suddenly looking at the enormous, bloated form of Mojo himself, who cackles madly and flexes his claws a little before pushing a few buttons on the console of his mechanical walker. "Hello, good evening and welcome," he says in the screeching, insane voice that seems to go out of its way to sound more like nails scraping down a chalkboard with every word he speaks. "Welcome indeed, to Homo Superior Deathmatch! It's fast, it's furious and you'll all be wondering if your favourites will survive." He taps another couple of buttons and the platform that Emma, Lisa and I are standing on starts moving downwards, towards a sandy arena that has body parts scattered all around it, along with large dark red splashes of dried blood. "So get ready, sports fans, as this week's award-winning show kicks off once more! You'd have to be insane to miss it!"

_Oh, for God's sake. Why doesn't he just go the whole way and shout "Let's get ready to rumble"?_ Emma sends to me, sourly.

When the platform reaches the ground, I step forwards, ice myself up, and try not to get too anxious about what's coming next. After fighting a mob of T-Rex, skeletons and some mobsters, this should be a piece of cake.

I hope.

Mojo starts his crowing again, as spotlights focus on me. "Introducing first, the cold-hearted clown with a killer sense of humour – the one, the only Iceman!" Then the spotlights shift to Emma. "And his tag-team partners – she's sharp as diamond and twice as sexy. It's the White Queen, Spineless Ones!" And finally, the lights shine on Lisa. "And here's the unknown quality, my friends – she's the winged avenger with a heart of gold: Lisa Burrows!"

"This guy gave you problems?" Lisa says, pointing her thumb at Mojo's control booth. "Seems just like an overweight network executive to me."

"Yeah, he –" I begin, before the lights switch to the other side of the arena, where three doors are slowly opening. _I don't like the look of this…_

Mojo cackles a little before continuing with his insane monologue. "And their opponents – first, from the deepest depths of my imagination: Frostbite!" The first door opens to reveal what looks like an ogre made out of ice, carrying a giant club that looks like it's actually part of his hand. "And his tag-team partners – first, to counter the White Queen, you need a Black Diamond!" The second door opens as a slinky black-clad woman with deathly-pale skin sashays out onto the bloody sand. She's wearing a mask that leaves her mouth uncovered (so that her mouthful of sharp fangs can still be seen) and carries a whip, and looks like she means nothing but business. "And finally: Buzz-Killer!" The last door creaks open, and a hulking seven-foot giant stalks out. He's got long black wings, large compound eyes, and his hands are tipped with vicious claws – and from what I can see from where I'm standing, it looks like there's some kind of poisonous gas coming from his mouth and nostrils. Before I can get a closer look at any of the three, Mojo shouts "Let the games begin!"

The ice-ogre starts stomping towards me, swinging his club angrily. Instantly, I know that without any additional protection he'll turn me into a greasy smear of slush on the arena floor, so every part of my body gets at least five or six extra-thick new layers of ice. I end up standing about two or three feet taller than I had been before, which still only brings me up to this guy's ugly-ass chest, which is covered with ice-warts and scars like the Grand Canyon. He swings the club in his right hand towards me, and I'm just about able to duck, while spraying a wide arc of sharp ice-darts at his legs. They all hit and stick into his frozen skin, making him roar with anger and try to punch me with his left fist. I duck, but he catches me with a glancing blow on my right shoulder. Instantly it goes numb, even through the ice-shell, and I find myself trying not to panic as my right hand goes completely dead, numbed beyond all sensation.

_Okay… this could be better._

Next to me, I can see Emma sizing up her own opponent, who cracks her whip and grins crazily at her, the sharp teeth gleaming in the harsh lights of the arena. The whip lashes out, like a snake striking, but Emma has the sense to throw up her good arm to stop it. The whip coils around her forearm, making her cry out in pain, but she's able to drag the woman forwards and pull her off-balance. It only lasts for an instant, though, as the woman uses her forward momentum to launch herself into a cartwheel and come up on both feet again. Emma strikes as aggressive a stance as she can manage, but I can feel that she knows she won't last long with an injured arm against a homicidal acrobat who's got more weapons than she has, and is in full health.

Meanwhile, Lisa is trying to fend off the big insect-man, whose vapour is making her cough and wheeze. In fact, it's doing more than that: it's making her knees shake and her chest heave. Seems like it's an actual insecticide – Lisa looks like she's about to faint and puke all at the same time, but she's still spitting out fat chunks of her mucus and trying to throw them so that they cover her foe's eyes, as well as try to keep as out of the way of the vapour as she can.

_Time to take charge of this situation – and the old solutions are always the best ones…_ "Guys, we need to switch dance partners!" I shout out as I duck under another huge punch from the ice-ogre, hoping that Emma and Lisa are both able to hear me over the sounds of fighting. "Emma, you take Frosty here, and Lisa, I'll take the Tick, which leaves you with Miss Whiplash. Everyone cool with that?"

"I suppose," Emma begins, as she narrowly avoids another slashing blow from the pale woman's lash, "that I don't have a choice." She and I quickly switch places so that she's standing in front of the giant. If I'm right, he's probably got all kinds of fail-safes built in against my powers – but against Emma's telepathy, he's likely to be less well-protected.

It's a gamble, for sure, but I hope this one will pay off, unlike the bet I put on the Rangers last week. Ducking out of the way of the Goth girl's whip, Lisa and I complete our changing of the guard, and then I'm stood up against the insect-man that was giving her so many problems. When he closes with me I can immediately tell what got Lisa so irritated – the guy's breath is almost bad enough to make me lose my lunch. Raising up both my hands, I coat his mouth with a thick bar of ice, to prevent most of the gas from escaping. It still smells a little, but it's much better than before. He tries to take to the air after clawing at the ice with both of his hands, but I quickly aim a couple of surgical ice-blasts at his wings, linking them together right when he's about to take off, and he ends up sprawling face-first in the bloody dirt. With my increased size, it's easy for me to knock him out with one punch to the side of the head from my iced-up right fist. As I do so, I can hear Emma grunting with effort as she grabs hold of the ice-ogre's small mind, and then makes him use his club to flatten the nimble whip-girl with a decisive hammer-blow, before ordering him to smash himself unconscious in the same way. He crashes to the ground like an ancient tree, making the floor shake for a second or two.

Right then, Mojo shrieks in disgust as his champions are laid low. "Intolerable! Insolent! Unacceptable! You three are cancelled! Cancelled! Cancelled! Spiral, get rid of them!"

At his side, Spiral simply smiles – her face is magnified dozens of times by the big screens all around the arena, so it's easy for us to see what's going on at the top of Mojo's podium – and bows. "As you wish, my lord." Then she dances off the podium, vanishes, and reappears next to us. "I warned you, little X-Men," she chuckles. "Don't expect Lord Mojo to come calling again. You've just jumped the shark. He hates that."

"My heart bleeds," Emma sneers. "I don't want to have to stay here a moment longer than I have to."

Spiral laughs again, and spins around on one foot to create the familiar static vortex around us, and this time it only takes a moment for it to fade. When it does, we find ourselves stood in the front garden of the Xavier Institute, with stars twinkling down on us from a cloudless sky. "That's all, folks!" Spiral says, before she dances herself back to Mojoworld and leaves us all standing out in the cold.

Lisa looks up at the mansion's frontage and then says "I hate to be a burden, but do you guys think you could take me back to my place? This isn't my house, after all."

"There are enough rooms for you to stay the night, Lisa," I say firmly. "It's the least we can do after getting you dragged into this mess. Isn't it, Emma?"

Emma raises her eyebrows. "I suppose so. I'll find you some nightclothes you can change into, too. Just because I'm feeling generous." She pads quietly into the front hall then, leaving Lisa and me alone for just a second. Lisa points after her with a small smile on her face.

"Is she always this nice to guests?" she asks wryly.

"Believe it or not, this is her being accommodating," I laugh. "Come on. I'll find you a room and you can sleep this whole experience off…"

* * *

After finding Lisa some pyjamas and a spare room, Emma and I are also getting ready for a good eight hours' worth of sleep. "Nice time we had tonight, huh?" I say, picking up my copy of the latest Tom Clancy novel so that I can read a few more chapters before going to sleep. Emma looks daggers at me, putting down her reading glasses and her own book so that she can focus her glare right on me.

"I hope you're joking, Bobby," she says. "You do know that tonight was probably the worst date I've ever had with anybody, ever?"

I sigh. "Oh, c'mon, it wasn't that bad, was it? You got to make a T-Rex into your own little puppy dog, didn't you? And we made a new friend, too. See? It wasn't all gloom and doom."

"The only thing that could make it worse, Bobby, is if you try and cap this evening off by trying to get me to have sex with you. I'm so not in the mood tonight that you could turn into Harrison Ford before my eyes, and I'd still say no."

"Not even if I called you my princess?" I say, digging at her ribs gently with a fingertip.

Emma squirms away from me with a sour look on her face. "Not even."

"Not even if I started talking dirty Star Wars-style? Meesa Bobby Drake, and meesa gonna make yousa a happy lady!"

"You're an idiot, Drake," Emma replies, rolling her eyes. "As if anybody would find that moronic character sexy."

"Not even if I started calling you Grand Admiral Frost, and asked for permission to dock my Star Destroyer?"

"Now you're getting desperate, Drake," Emma laughs. "We both know you're nothing more than a frigate anyway. But 'Grand Admiral Frost' has a nice ring to it. Start there, and maybe you might get lucky…"

_ The End._


End file.
